The Atari 520ST was introduced at the Winter CES in January of 1985, 6 months before the
Commodore Amiga.
Atari did take some shortcuts, though, as the Operating System did not yet exist in ROM, and had to be
loaded from floppy-disk when powered on (but then again, so did the Amiga). The 520ST also had no internal
floppy drive, but later versions included it.

Both Amiga and 520ST are based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, which has a 16-bit external bus, and 32-bit internal,
thus the 520'ST' means 'sixteen / thirty two'. The Operating System is 'TOS', or 'Tramiel Operating System'.

The 520ST (and Amiga) have a graphical operating system, or GUI, similar to the
Apple Macintosh, which was released one year earlier. The 520ST utilized Digital
Research's GEM GUI, although it is not nearly as nice as the Macintosh or Amiga.

One thing that IS very nice is the built-in VT52 emulation. The 520ST can act as a dumb terminal, communicating
through its serial port to another system.

There was a huge rivalry between Amiga and Atari users, each positive that their computer system was superior,
or at least hoping it was.

In addition to the 520ST, Atari release the 1040ST, with built-in floppy drive, and 1Meg of RAM (the 520ST has 512K).
Four years later in 1989, the portable ST computer appeared, the Stacy.

Related Links

Partial History of the Atari Computers

196?: As an engineering student at the University of Utah, Nolan Bushnell liked to sneak into the computer labs
late at night to play computer games on the university's $7 million mainframes.

1972: Bushnell founded Atari with $250 of his own money and another
$250 from business partner Ted Dabney. They then created and commercialized the world's first
commercial video game, Pong. Bushnell was 27 years old.